The Museu Carmen Thyssen Andorra offers you this week a new guided tour of a particular work from the exhibition “INFLUENCERS in Art. From Van Goyen to Pop Art“, which you can discover from home.
Today, we invite you to discover “Parisian Street“, by the artist Gaspar Miró i Lleó, which is part of the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza collection.
Born in Vilanova i la Geltrú on 2 March 1859 and died in Barcelona on 29 September 1930, the Catalan artist Gaspar Miró i Lleó is known for his great success in Paris. Trained at the prestigious Llotja School in Barcelona, he first visited the French capital in 1884, when he was only 25 years old. Synonymous with artistic revolution, the painter discovered a city at the height of its social splendour which embodied, as he had certainly imagined, a real emblem of modernity.
There, the artist discovered the Impressionist movement, which was at that time in full expansion. Captivated by this current, he admires its particular treatment of light and sensation. He exalts the appropriation of the fleeting and ephemeral present moment, which gives posterity an accurate and realistic vision of what Parisian life could be at the dawn of the 20th century. This new aesthetic trend, which promotes “impression“, frees the line and the touch of the artist, who gradually abandons the academic precepts inculcated during his training at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts.
Recognised as a popular painter, Gaspar Miró i Lleó describes on the one hand the daily life of the city’s habitants and, on the other, its environment, making his works visual testimonies of the new Paris, born and modelled throughout the 19th century. His work earned him the title of “Painter of the City of Paris”, granted by the City Council, which allows him to set up his easel wherever his inspiration takes him, on the ground of the streets, parks or even official buildings.
